Insitu, FireWhat and Esri partnered to help aerial reconnaissance for fighting wildfires. Insitu’s INEXA Solutions professional aerial remote-sensing services group will work with FireWhat’s fire professionals, using its GIS customized for firefighters and hosted on Esri’s ArcGIS platform.

Long, spiraling cloud patterns in the sky, “von Kármán vortices,” arise when winds are diverted around a blunt, high-profile area, often an island rising from the ocean. The alternating direction of rotation in the air forms swirls in the clouds.

On Aug. 2, 2017, Arianespace launched a Vega rocket carrying two Earth-observation satellites for Italy, France and Israel. It took 97 minutes to deliver the Optsat-3000 and Venμs satellites into their planned orbits.

The European Space Agency (ESA) Proba-V minisatellite recorded the seasonal changes in Africa’s sub-Saharan Sahel, which stretches more than 5,000 kilometers across Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean (Senegal, Mauritania) to the Red Sea (Sudan).

Over the last few months, a chunk of Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf has been hanging on precariously as a deep crack cut across the ice. Witnessed by the European Space Agency (ESA) Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, a lump of ice more than twice the size of Luxembourg finally broke off on July 12, 2017.

On July 14, 2017, the Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) successfully launched two Norwegian microsatellites developed and built by SFL for the Norwegian Space Centre with support from the Norwegian Coastal Authority, Space Norway and the European Space Agency.

In July 2017, sweltering temperatures and strong winds fueled intense wildfires in southern California. The fires forced thousands of people to flee their homes, charred dozens of structures, closed roads and darkened skies throughout the region with thick smoke.